If you think you’re some sort of Social Media Guru; then brace yourself for some fresh info.

On Snapchat, there are no inbound-outbound links to share. You don’t rank in terms of the number of likes you attract.

You don’t even have a page in the first place!

Forget about going viral on Snapchat- “viral” is a foreign concept. Because, if you create the most interesting content, post it on your Story where it’s supposed to last longest, it will disappear after 24 hours.

Other content disappears in even less time of about 10 seconds.

Yes, you’re at liberty to set the length of time you want that content to last if you send it directly to a friend.

3 Incredible Tips for Brands to Build a Successful Snapchat Channel

Tip 1: Interact with and make your audience part of your story

It’s not a place for instant gratification- it takes a while to see your marketing infrastructure take off on the platform.

But if you start with the right strategy, every effort you put in eventually starts to yield an ROI. One of the best practices is to engage your followers by making them part of your story.

Taco Bell is my #1 choice and for good reason. It reports that 90% of its followers who open a message it sends view it in entirety. The fun part is that these are often a long digital photo or video collages, up to five minutes long.

Tip 2: Expand the Creative Range of the Network Through Stop-Motion Storytelling

The guy is always coming up with new ways to tell a story and never uploads any pre-recorded animations or videos. Hats off.

If you watch these videos, you’ll see how easy it is to agree with Nicolai on his judgment of Kyle Coghlan’s Snapchat capabilities.

Kyle Coghlan creates a series of still graphics/ snaps and arranges them in a way that moving from one to the next creates a sort of narrative.

He involves you, the viewer, in the story making the process by asking you to tap your screen faster to make the story seamless. A single bunch of still photos tapped consistently one after the other creates a unique stop-motion video.

Tailor Nicolai may applaud ProducerKCM as the most creative when it comes to stop-motion videos.

But others think otherwise.

Perhaps he too would change his mind when he meets Harris Markowitz. He came from Twitter and made Snapchat his most powerful medium.

The Shorty Awards nominated him “Snapchatter of the Year”. His stop-motion videos are exceptional and feature stuffed animals and Post-it notes. He’ll make you laugh with his comic sketches and answer your questions on his Q&A sessions.

If you can only pick half of this art and adopt a style that works for your target audiences, there’s no limit to how far you’d go.

Tip 3: Don’t Throw Traffic from other Networks like Instagram, Vine out of the window Yet!

Brands partnering with social media luminaries is an essential Snapchat strategy.

They rely on these folks who already have an audience in order to quickly build their own following on the ephemeral app.

One may wonder how these luminaries get to have so many followers on Snapchat which has no in-app discovery feature such as hashtags.

There actually are a few ways you can draw traffic from other social media channels into your Snapchat.

Cody Johns, for instance, runs a number of Coca-Cola promotions. He commonly does cross promotion of the brand’s Snapchat account with his personal pages spread across the social media space.

Cody Johns is a well-known Vine superstar and is equally successful on Instagram. He makes use of all these sources for the Snapchat accounts he runs.

Cameron Francis is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of ETRAFFIC, Melbourne's 1 Creative Agency and Digital Marketing Company. He is passionate about helping businesses of all sizes improve their online visibility.